Good News! China Miéville Has Written a Bad Book

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A few years back I binge-read China Miéville’s first seven novels straight through, in chronological order. The experience was an eye-opener, a mind-blower. Until then I had read little science fiction, and some J.R.R. Tolkien was the extent of my dabbling in fantasy. And now suddenly, this British writer named China Miéville had taken me to the place where, as one fan so nicely put it, “Middle Earth meets Dickensian London on really good acid.”

One of the most impressive things about those seven fantasy novels was that each one was very different from the others, yet they bore the stamp of a single, and singular, intelligence. That intelligence was not merely restless, it was ravenous — for new worlds, new characters, new stories, new machines, new monsters, new ways to embody good and evil. The novels teemed with human frogs, creatures that were half-human and half-bird, cactus people, human rats, giant squids, plus an assortment of cultists, magickers, talking tattoos, and stone-cold killers. There wasn’t a space ship or a space alien in sight. The stories unspooled in the sewers of London, in phantasmagorical cities, on floating cities made of roped-together boats. There was even a delightful children’s book in the mix, featuring a church made of cobwebs, flying double-decker buses, and trash bins that know karate. As I wrote here after my reading binge, a key to Miéville’s success is that he has chosen to work that fertile borderland where pulp meets the surreal, and his most persistent themes are highly pertinent to the world we live in today: the bogus nature of messiahs, the need for solidarity among society’s marginalized people as they fight prejudice, oppression, and state power. To top it off, he’s proud to be pegged a genre writer, and he writes knockout sentences.

Shortly before I sat down with Miéville’s new novel, This Census-Taker, I happened to read an essay in The New York Review of Books by Tim Parks entitled “A Novel Kind of Conformity.” It’s a tightly argued lament about one of the more damaging trends in contemporary book publishing — “the decision on the part of most large publishers to allow their sales staff a say in which novels get published and which don’t.” Parks quotes an editor who says that whenever he pitches a new novel at editorial meetings, someone from the sales staff invariably asks, “But what other book is it like?” As Parks puts it, “Only when a novel could be presented as having a reassuring resemblance to something already commercially successful was it likely to overcome the veto of the sales staff.” One result is that all novelists — from first-timers to denizens of mid-list limbo to established international brands — “tend to give publishers what they want.”

Yes, book publishers traded their tweed jackets for calculators a while ago, and since then most books have morphed from works of art into product that must be moved in sufficient numbers. That’s not news, and it’s not a sin for publishers (or writers) to want to make money. What is news, as Parks points out, is that the ascendancy of economic considerations over artistic ones has led to “a growing resistance at every level to taking risks in novel writing.” Parks adds that the attention to sales numbers has been dramatically — and, one could argue, disastrously — magnified by electronic media and its immediate, inescapable feedback loop. Novelists, like everyone else today, ache to be looked at, clicked on, shared with, and “liked,” if not loved.

“Hence,” Parks concludes, “the successful novelist is constantly encouraged to produce more of the same…Celebrity, it would appear, breeds conformity.” He cites two recent examples: Haruki Murakami’s “dull” Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and Jonathan Franzen’sPurity. Parks calls them “tired, lackluster attempt(s) to produce yet another bestseller in the same vein.”

That essay’s central lament — the dearth of risk-taking by today’s novelists — was on my mind as I dipped into This Census-Taker. On the very first page it became apparent that this novel was not in the same vein as Miéville’s earlier work. The first two sentences establish the central narrative ploy: an unnerving switching back and forth between the first and third persons, a way of establishing the indeterminacy of everything that is to follow. Unlike its predecessors, this novel’s world is claustrophobic, not expansive. Its characters are made of cardboard, not flesh and blood and scales and feathers. Monsters are hinted at but never seen. The maddeningly vague story amounts to this: a boy living on a remote hillside above a town may or may not have seen his father murder his mother; the father may or not be a serial murderer; the mother may or may not have fled the home before the father had a chance to kill her. Hunh?

A rare flash of Miéville’s trademark ingenuity surfaces in the father’s profession as a maker of magical keys: “His customers would come up from the town and ask for the things for which people usually ask — love, money, to open things, to know the future, to fix animals, to fix things, to be stronger, to hurt someone or save someone, to fly — and he’d make them a key.” Far more prevalent, unfortunately, are murky descriptions like this one of a derelict bridge where homeless children live as squatters:

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. Where else could those children live?

Even as my unease and disappointment increased with each passage like this, I began to feel a strangely pleasurable tingling. There was no escaping the fact that I was reading a bad book by a very fine writer, but it occurred to me that this was actually a good thing. China Miéville, a writer with an international cult following whose commercial success is every bit as secure as Murakami or Franzen’s, had dared to do something that they, so far, have not. He had dared to take risks, he had dared to leave his comfort zone, he had dared to fail. And that’s precisely what he did. I find a failure of this kind far more admirable, if not more satisfying, than another safe commercial success.

Even so, I can’t help wondering why Miéville wrote such a book. I have a theory, though it might be far-fetched. In the Acknowledgments, Miéville writes, “Much of this book was written during a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, N.H.; and then as a residency fellow of the Lannan Foundation, in Marfa, Tex. I am profoundly grateful to both organizations for their generous support.”

Here, maybe, is the devilish paradox. The publishing industry is set up to minimize risk-taking by novelists and to ensure that novels will be safe, saleable commodities. Yet it was when he stepped away from the grubby demands of the marketplace — when he took the MacDowell and Lannan money and was suddenly free to write whatever he chose to write, without regard for its marketability — that Miéville stumbled. In this case, the freedom to take risks led not to something fresh and new, but to a disastrous disconnect with readers.

That said, I still applaud China Miéville for daring to fail. I hope he realizes his earlier novels were successful precisely because they were ablaze with risk and they avoided the novelist’s cardinal sin. They never lost sight of the fact that the writer’s primary responsibility is not to himself, but to the reader.

Bill Morris
is a staff writer for The Millions. He is the author of the novels Motor City Burning, All Souls’ Day, and Motor City, and the nonfiction book American Berserk. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times, The (London) Independent, L.A. Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City.

When she was seventeen, Deb Olin Unferth trailed her boyfriend into Central America to join a revolution. Any revolution. They ran out of money, and so they came home. “I was eighteen. That’s the whole story,” Unferth tells us. This is not the whole story, and we know this because we are only two pages into a 224-page book. The revolution winds up serving as the backdrop for a different kind of war, the one between the author and George, the philosophy major she fell for as a freshman at a “large state school in a large state. “ George is mysterious, magnetic, incapable of genuine human interaction. Unferth convinces herself that he is a genius and affixes herself to him with a love that borders on veneration. It’s this infatuation, and not concern for the fate of Latin America’s children that compels her to leave school to take a volunteer job at an orphanage caught in the middle of warring El Salvadorian military forces. After Unferth gets them banished from the orphanage because she won’t wear a bra, they hitchhike through a series of ravaged countries, running out of money and falling out of love and not wanting to admit to either one.
With Revolution: the Year I Fell In Love and Went to Join the War, Unferth accomplishes what a lot of writers wish they could, completing a book that establishes her as a literary light and also serves as a settling of scores after a relationship that veered madly off course. The whole score-settling aspect of things is more complicated than I’m giving it credit for here, but the fact remains that there are a lot of reasons to write a memoir and one of them is to give yourself the chance to live history again, this time with all the events that matter solidly under your control. Revisiting her early twenties gives Unferth the agency she didn’t have back then, and it’s this tension between the Unferth of now—two well-received works of fiction, a professorship at the Wesleyan University, a star on the Believer walk of fame—and the Unferth of 1987—knobbly, insecure, the type of person who will follow her boyfriend into war-torn territory because it doesn’t occur to her not to—that becomes the axis around which Revolution spins. This conceit is risky, and it wouldn’t work at all if Unferth weren’t so likeable. But she is, so it does, so much so that by the end of the book, the reader replaces her as the stricken lover, willing to follow her anywhere she wants us to go.
Unferth and George lead us through Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador and Nicaragua, interviewing priests, politicians and civilians and recording the interviews on tape. They never listen to the tapes and later, when she begins to understand the level of carnage at work at the time, Unferth gets a “sick feeling of knowledge.” A parade of massacres was happening before their eyes, and, she confesses to us, she had no clue. As she recalls her earnest, bewildered march across Central America, she takes jabs at herself and the other expatriates on extended vacations in countries they have no business in. In Managua, she meets a troop of traveling Canadian jugglers traipsing their way through Nicaragua. “Imagine. We were walking across their war, juggling. We were bringing guitars, plays adapted from Gogol, elephants wearing tasseled hats….The Nicaraguans wanted land, literacy, a decent doctor. We wanted a nice sing-a-long and a ballet.”
Moments like this one save Revolution from the narcissism that could so easily disable this particular species of memoir. The current version of Unferth, the one narrating the story, reads about her younger self along with us, judging her pratfalls and mistakes before we can. We’re free to watch as Unferth wrestles her early twenties into novelistic elements: exposition, climax, epiphany, logical conclusion. Of course, reality isn’t shaped like that, and this is something the author knows, and seems bent on making sure we know, too. She circles her narrative back in on itself, calling into question her own account of the truth. What she’s going for here isn’t accuracy so much as faith. Alongside her remembered version of the story, she offers her mother’s comments and notes from her journal, always allowing for the idea that things didn’t happen the way she’s telling us now, that maybe some of it never happened at all. This reordering of history results in a formidable deconstruction of the genre, a subtle but effective response to state-of-the-form manifestos like Ander Monson’sVanishing Point: Not a Memoirand David Shields’Reality Hunger.
The writing here is visceral. We feel it when a horde of tiny flesh eating bugs takes residence under the author’s skin, or when the sun threatens to smother her while she sleeps in a metal-roofed hostel. Her description of the unforgiving landscape mirrors her evolution as a writer, as she finds herself playing out a fate she didn’t plan. She doesn’t, she discovers too late, particularly want to be part of the revolution but she trucks gamely along, long after she’s admitted to herself that can’t explain why she’s there. Later, she does the same thing as a fiction writer, teaching composition at too many universities while the rejection slips pile up and her parents wonder what they did wrong. Of course, it all works out in the end but here, Unferth shares with us that point in her life when nothing is working out, when she has no inkling that it ever will. Her candor is what keeps us with her as she returns, many years later, to Central America by herself, trying and failing to recapture something she can’t name.
“Why would this trip mean so much that I’d have to keep going back to find it?” she asks. What compels us to rewrite the past? To turn life into something meaningful instead of absurd? Near the end of the book, Unferth attempts to find George, whom she hasn’t spoken to in decades. For the sake of the story, of course, she hires a private detective to search him out, and what she discovers first disappoints and then delights her. While her trips back to El Salvador and Nicaragua fail to bring the back the past the way she wants them to, in George she discovers that the thready, magnificent days of her youth are still alive. George’s fate offers her the same revelation we experience as we make our way through her careful memories: it is possible to trammel our histories. The past is right there, waiting for someone to come along and put it into words.

At the end of 'The Lonely City,' Laing does not offer up novel “answers,” either to her own loneliness or the reader’s; it’s not clear, even, whether the book feels loneliness is a problem to be solved.

13 comments:

On a parenthetical note, I would not take anything Tim Parks says about Jonathan Franzen too much to heart. He has a recurrent animus toward this writer that appears almost like a personal vendetta. This would certainly loosen his “tight argument” if only a bit.

I really don’t care for any of Mieville’s writing. Like Murakami, he is a very intelligent and talented writer, but his stories never really seem to go anywhere. And, while I love Franzen’s work in general, Purity was just awful.

Bill, just a short comment on Tim Parks remark about the publisher’s sales person asking “but what other book is it like?” How frustrating for the novelist that the publishers have such a lack of imagination.

I just started Purity and am already asking myself WHY? As for Miéville, he wrote a book at the McDowell Colony? Really? I think he was hanging out with the wrong sort of people there.
As for commercial considerations, even in the literary genre, it’s clear that readers won’t follow far out of their comfort zone. The most audacious American novel published last year — that I saw anyway — was The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann — he weds the Western doom of Cormac McCarthy with the linguistic prowess of William Gaddis, while telling a cracking yarn. But did readers follow? Except for his smallish cult, nope.

I was all for your article, save for a glaring error: you ruined it with your blatantly contradictory points that undermine your thesis:

How can you argue that Mieville was with this novel and because of the fellowship and residency “SUDDENLY free to write whatever he chose to write, without regard for its marketability” — THEN go on to state — as well as acknowledge beforehand — that his “earlier novels were successful precisely because they were ablaze with risk”.

In other words surely Mieville has from the outset, consistently, always written what he has wanted to. It seems to me his writing has never been compromised by decisions by sales staff or editors telling him what he could write or not. And I’m sure if they did, Mieville would tell them in a post-Marxist, polite sort of way to fuck right off.

‘There wasn’t a space ship or a space alien in sight.’ surely the reviewer must – & should, given the sweeping statements he makes about Mieville & his work – be aware of EMBASSYTOWN? even if it wasn’t part of the reviewer’s reading experience, it’s a significant blindspot that should have been addressed. as for the quote from CENSUS, it isn’t murky at all. it’s as clear a discourse as any i have read on a theme familiar to readers of writers as diverse as popular fantasists such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore; memoirists, poets, psychogeographers; ‘experimental’ writers such as Perec; Mieville himself: i.e., the ‘unplaceness’ of certain ‘unplaces’: roads, hallways, staircases, &c, w/c are not there for people to be, but to pass, to use in order to move from one Actual Place to another. the passage emphasizes the oddness, the cognitive disjunct/paradox of people *living* in such a nonplaces, w/c, btw, is thematically in keeping w/ Mieville’s earlier work, most notably KING RAT, UN LUN DUN – cited here – & THE CITY & THE CITY. as for Mieville leaving his comfort zone or whatever, a not very close look at the books the reviewer has read, at the author himself & his politics, should make it very clear that ‘marketability’ might be among the least of Mieville’s concerns, the chief of which is basically to write what he wants (providing a venue to examine his personal politics perhaps coming a close second). as such, the argument for CENSUS being a ‘bad book’ is, more than just unconvincing, barely an argument at all: it’s an assertion for w/c i see no evidence here.

Sham, yes, totally OK to have opinions, even negative ones. But when you keep hitting the same note over and over, it goes a little beyond dislike into obsession mode. I suspect you share his opinion, based on your comment.

I just happened on Bill’s wonderful article on Henry Miller, and read a few more of his. Not sure how I’ve missed him, but he’s one of the best writers writing about books now. Can’t wait to read more.

To suggest Murakami hasn’t taken risks, and risked failure, in his career is blatantly untrue. His career is filled with experiments, his most recent book notwithstanding. Franzen, however, will never write anything different than he already has because he’s an absolute bore and that’s all he knows how to do.

How interesting. I read the Tim Parks column too and I’m very familiar with publishers asking me to name a book that my books are like. It’s a kind of threshold question that determines whether your book will get past the gatekeepers. This seems paradoxical when new writers are often praised for being something completely different, but I understand it too given that publishing is a business and they want to be as sure as possible their product will sell. ‘

What you describe in this new Mieville happened to Ishiguro too when he followed up ‘The Remains Of The Day’ with ‘The Unconsoled’. I’ve read that it was a deliberate choice to do something quite different from the earlier books and it certainly didn’t work for me. I’m a Mieville fan too but I can see how easily he could tip over into over-effort. Something I found very interesting in the early ‘King Rat’ was that you could see the later Mieville in formation, not quite working but still exciting.

And I have a long-standing theory that many writers just write too much. This means either than they keep on writing the same thing (John Banville) or they write things that just don’t work.

I.A man is condemned to a small room in a castle in a land that is not his own. A thousand typewritten pages cover the desk before him. Each of the thousand pages recounts two hundred murders. The man will not be released until he has read every word of every cold-blooded killing, and has made sure that every comma and period is in place.For the average North American, this scenario probably reads like a Kafkan parable, or one of Stanislav Lem's thought-experiments. In Central America, however (where, the joke goes, "magical realism" is just called "realism"), it might pass for a news item. Indeed, in the cathedral of Guatemala City in 1998, a thousand-page document very much like the one above was presented to the public. It was the work of the church-backed Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (REMHI) project, and it recorded in meticulous detail the Guatemalan Army's reign of terror during a 30-year Civil War. Two days after its release, Bishop Juan Gerardi, who spearheaded the effort, was found beaten to death in his own garage.Now two of our most talented writers - the Guatemalan-American Francisco Goldman and the Salvadoran Horacio Castellanos Moya - have trained their sights on this singular event. The resulting books are, in many ways, a study in contrasts: one is long where the other is short; one is factual where the other is fictional. Taken together, though, they offer a contour map of Central American politics, a shadowland where the borders between the state and the individual, between the nightmarish and the quotidian, and between narrative and truth threaten to disappear entirely.II.Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed The Bishop? takes a journalistic approach to the slaying of Bishop Gerardi. Through eight years of painstaking reporting, Goldman confirms that Gerardi's murder was in fact an assassination, and he reconstructs the plot in forensic detail. Unlike Goldman's three novels, The Art of Political Murder takes a meat-and-potatoes approach to language; the book's real art lies in its narrative structure. It builds its case in widening circles, implicating layer upon layer of bureaucracy. The cumulative effect is like Rashomon - every time we return to the central murder, we see it from a new angle - except that, with each reiteration, Goldman is bringing us closer to the truth.He is also, not incidentally, taking us on a tour of Guatemalan history. It turns out that the horrors documented in the REMHI report were not as remote from the metropole as they seem. They were facilitated, like parallel campaigns in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, by funds and personnel from the U.S. government. We learn here of the United Fruit Company's machinations in the Kennedy cabinet, and of the double-dealing of later presidents. We learn of the bureaucratic intricacies of Guatemala's security apparatus, which persisted even after the negotiated peace of 1996. Really, Goldman concludes, the military campaign never ended.In many ways, the legal battle over the Gerardi case turns out to be a proxy war, a struggle for control of the historical record that pits the people of Guatemala against the Army's powerful officer corps. Goldman's political sympathies are clear: he stands with the supporters of REMHI; the military men who plot against them are portrayed as soulless killers. But confined to the hothouse of Guatemalan politics, this struggle between good and evil takes on the urgency of a thriller, and the moral grandeur of opera.III.Like Goldman, Horacio Castellanos Moya writes about the REMHI report from first-hand experience; unlike Goldman's, his experience predates the Gerardi murder. The months he spent editing human rights documents in Guatemala might have made for an interesting memoir, but in Senselessness, Castellanos Moya is apparently after something more. In 140 trenchant pages, he crafts an intimate first-person account of the psychological toll state-sponsored terror exacts on witnesses as well as victims.Like the late Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (at least in Castellanos Moya's memorable formulation), the narrator of Senselessness "is a snake. He has rattles. He has poison." But here Castellanos Moya bends the long Bernhardian prose line to his own purposes. His sentences (in Katharine Silver's sinuous translation) coil through registers and tenses:Life is marvelous, I exclaimed to myself, about three hours later, marveling at the sight of [a girl]... about whom I knew so little until that moment and who was about to become the object of my attentions but also those of half a dozen indolent beasts drinking beer in the Modelo Cevichería, a kind of food kiosk with a few plastic chairs squeezed onto one side of the small plaza in front of the Conservatory, half a dozen beasts among whom I ought to include myself a bit shamefacedly and who were stupefied and drooling as they stared at the two girls crossing the street in front of the Conservatory and approaching down the sidewalk toward the cevichería. It also registers the uncertainty and insecurity ("a bit shamefacedly") behind the imperious voice.The narrator's emotional and syntactical excesses are in constant tension with the novel's spare architecture: we get a setting scrubbed of identifying markers - it could be any Central American capital - and very few actual characters. In place of any real plot, Castellanos Moya gives us a growing sense that the narrator is losing his mind.The proximate cause of his breakdown is the haunting language of the report he is editing. Phrases from the testimony of the war's survivors lodge in his mind like burrs, but he is unable to communicate their poetic power to the Guatemalans around him, who appear inured to horror. As he meditates privately on his lines of found poetry - "That is my brother, he's gone crazy from all the fear he has said"; "For me remembering, it feels like I am living it once more" - his sexual frustration, misanthropy, and paranoia converge and threaten to engulf him. And then, in an unnerving conclusion we come to see that the narrator's blackest intimations may in fact be evidence of sanity.North of the border, we now tend to confuse literary gravity with literal weight. Our most serious novels are doorstoppers. But Senselessness, like Roberto Bolaño'sDistant Star (or, from the 1980s, Humberto Constantini'sThe Long Night of Francisco Sanctis), reminds us that the short novel has a heft of its own. It will be interesting to see in the coming years what North American writers can learn from their colleagues south of the border. The region's recent history may be a kind of charnel-house, but it has forged a generation of writers who synthesize political conviction and aesthetic bravura, on canvases small and large.

For civil libertarians, the inauguration of President Barack Obama augurs not only a brighter future, but a chance to shed light on the recent past. It goes almost without saying that the Bush Administration has, with its declaration of permanent war and attendant claims of executive privilege, sought to move the balance of power in this country in the direction of monarchy. Its (unsuccessful) arguments before the Supreme Court in the Hamdi and Rasul cases amounted to: "L'etat, c'est moi." Now, to judge by the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, those responsible for torture, for the lawless detention of American citizens, for illegal state surveillance, and for perjury may finally be brought to justice.Such a development would not be universally acclaimed. Bush partisans, not to mention the former President himself, have suggested that once Obama gets "read in" on still-classified interrogation and wiretapping programs, he may embrace their utility in fighting terrorism. Other conservatives have argued - less tendentiously, I think - that any "truth and reconciliation" process for former White House officials would touch off a political firestorm sufficient to engulf the rest of the Obama agenda. But, in the absence of a legal reckoning, the civil libertarians wonder, how will we ever learn what went wrong?The contours of this debate, as it currently stands, obscure an important fact: that the Bush Administration's gravest depredations are already matters of public record. Thanks to Seymour Hersh'sChain of Command, George Packer'sThe Assassin's Gate, and Mark Danner'sTorture and Truth, we know, for example, that the Vice President, the Director of the C.I.A., and the Secretary of Defense signed off on the torture of "enemy combatants." Whether or not this merits prosecution is open to discussion, but there is little need to establish a new set of institutions to expose the Bush Administration's wrongdoing. We've got an institution that works well. It's called investigative journalism.Two of the most recent and compelling books about the outgoing administration - Jane Mayer'sThe Dark Side and Barton Gellman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency - argue persuasively that the Bush approach to civil liberties departed from previous presidential scandals less in degree than in kind. While Clinton and Nixon broke the law, Vice President Dick Cheney and his bureaucratic enforcers attempted to rewrite it: to place executive power on a footing other than the inalienable rights of man.Of the two books, Gellman's comes the closest to offering the satisfactions of good literature, and thus should probably be approached with the most caution. Still, at least one of those satisfactions - a rich and complex protagonist - lends Gellman's reporting the ring of truth.In its relentless detail, Angler would seem at first to bolster the leftist caricature of Cheney as merely the Machiavellian power behind the throne. Gellman uncovers several incidents with profound legal and national-security implications in which Cheney "rolled" the president. Moreover, he documents a pattern in which vast tracts of what would become the most important areas of public policy were knowingly entrusted to the judgment of the vice president. Cheney's former counselor Mary Matalin explains that he arrived in office with a 'preordained policy portfolio' that spanned 'the economic issues, the security issues - even before 9/11, we had homeland security - and the energy issues... the iron issues, I don't know what else to call them. The steely issues. Apart from those, 'we had the go-to guy on the hill' because of Cheney's Senate duties and experience in the House."That was a remarkable list," Gellman notes:war and peace, the economy, natural resources, and negotiations with Congress. Nor was Matalin's description complete. It omitted, among other things, a preeminent role for Cheney in nominations and appointments, which did not stop with the transition. Cheney's brief, all in all, encompassed most of the core concerns of any president.On the other hand, Gellman is careful to complicate his portrait. For example, he shows a connoisseur's appreciation for Cheney's remarkable gifts as a bureaucrat. The Vice President, a former White House Chief-of-Staff, evidently brought to his new office a mastery of personnel matters: whom to place where, and which jobs mattered. He also had an innate understanding for what to keep secret and what to leak, and created in his office what amounted to a parallel government, carrying out in duplicate the functions of the National Security Council (NSC), the Office of Management and Budget, and - crucially - the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).Through the use of proxies (most notably the frightening David Addington, the hapless Alberto Gonzalez, and the delusional John Yoo); through discipline and secrecy; and through an acute sense of the vulnerabilities of his targets and opponents, Cheney would become not only the most powerful but, on his own terms, the most successful Vice President in history. Over eight years, he recast "the steely issues" in his own ideological image.To be sure, Gellman's tight focus on Cheney leaves something to be desired. A kind of foreshortening makes certain tangential objects - notably, the President - appear smaller than they likely were in real life. But Angler is no partisan hit-job; Gellman understands that Cheney is sincere in his sense of mission. The book quotes a letter Cheney wrote to his grandchildren on a day when he briefly became acting president (Bush was under anesthesia. There's a punchline here somewhere.):'My principal focus as vice president has been to protect the American people in our way of life. As you grow, you will come to understand the sacrifices that each generation makes to preserve freedom and democracy for future generations.'And were the Obama Administration rapidly to dismantle Cheney's pet programs - and were, God forbid, a terrorist attack to occur on American soil soon after, after seven years without - we might view his instincts (if not his methods) in a different light. This may strike you as simplistic. Then again, so are the moral contours of the universe in which the Vice President believes himself to be operating.Jane Mayer's book, more broadly focused on "How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," revisits many of Gellman's sources, and essentially corroborates his assertion that, under Cheney and Addington, OVP (the Office of the Vice President) sought to eradicate rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Because The Dark Side does not center on a single character, it lacks some of the narrative propulsion of Angler, but it probably offers a more comprehensive view of the workings of the Bush White House.That White House was not uniformly indifferent to civil liberties, Mayer shows. Her account illuminates not only the ineptitude of Gonzalez and the lawlessness of Yoo, but the supreme decency of Republican civil servants like Jack Goldsmith, head of OLC, and John Bellinger III, head counsel at NSC. Their adherence to the law - presumably a prerequisite for attorneys - comes to seem like heroism in comparison with what surrounded them. "Protect your client," one told Gonzalez, warning that torture could lead to prosecutions. Of course in the Bush White House, it was competence that rarely went unpunished.Through her meticulous sourcing and her dogged aggregation of the circumstantial evidence, Mayer persuades the reader that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the "black sites," and foreign prisons were not only licensed but encouraged high up the chain of command. This helps to explain why patterns of abuse migrated so quickly from Guantánamo to Iraq - those two chains converge at the very top. The President himself - well-meaning, shrewd in his way, but hostage at some deep level to his insecurities - emerges as the efficient cause for his Administration's human rights abuses. "We do not negotiate with ourselves," he says at one point. As a candidate, George W. Bush was much maligned for his malapropisms, but it was these royalist flourishes - "I intend to spend [my political capital]. It is my style" - that hold the key to the Presidential personality.Ultimately, the most valuable function of The Dark Side is to shred the Cheney camp's justifications for torture. In meticulous detail, the book explains why the abuses are illegal; why they are immoral; why they were uncalled for after September 11; and why they have been ineffective. And unlike Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's internment of Japanese-Americans, they almost became the permanent law of the land.Due to the heroic work of a small and shrinking cohort of investigative reporters, they will not. Ordinary Americans, their fears and longings expertly stoked by the White House, have so far seemed willing to stop there, to quit while we're ahead. Whatever we choose to do about the Bush Administration's misdeeds moving forward, though, we are no longer entitled to claim ignorance. And should our preference for attractive illusions over unpleasant truth allow some future president to reclaim the right to arrest without charges, to hold without habeas corpus, and to inflict on human beings "suffering 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure... or even death,'" we will have no one to blame but ourselves.Bonus link:Vanity Fair's"Oral History of the Bush White House"